とーく！！！ Just a quick Japanese print culture lesson. Seeing とーく, with it’s と and く in Hiragana placed around a katakana vowel extender ー thing may seem a little weird. Basically, this is トーク which is a katakana-ification of “Talk,” but they used Hiragana to make it cute. Hiragana is cuter than Katakana. I think this is a fact. That happens quite a bit in advertising, so keep on your toes!

This podcast is basically a conversation about recent business and economic trends that affect Japan. Most of the podcast has someone explaining things to Oe Mariko, and she keeps it moving by asking questions and giving prompts in a quasi-conversational manner. The podcast description says that it will clear up those unclear, fuzzy, you know… “モヤモヤ” subjects that you need to know if you’re an individual investor or just want to keep up to speed with the latest trends affecting the Japanese economy.

For example, on my flight back from China yesterday I was listening to one podcast where they happened to mention the increasing numbers of Chinese tourists in Japan. They went through the demographics of the visitors, what they were likely to spend on gifts, the places they were likely to visit, Japan’s readiness in regards to the increase in non-English speaking tourists, stuff like that. I recommend this podcast to anyone learning Japanese because it’s not as much of an in your face information dump as a straight forward news podcast, yet the conversation is serious enough that you’ll still learn lots from it.

Yeah!!! I love this pod cast! Oe Mariko’s voice is incredibly addictive to listen to for me. It made me verrry thrilled to see this on here! Thanks for recommending it, seriously. I’m not even into economics, but I do like this podcast.

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